EA veterans announce 'Shards,' an MMO that you create

A group of industry veterans from Electronic Arts have formed a new studio focused on multiplayer role-playing games for PC.

Citadel Studios has announced its first game: a sandbox RPG codenamed Shards that will let players create and run their own massively multiplayer online game (MMO) through "unprecedented" modding capabilities.

Derek Brinkmann, Chris Ondrus, and Tim Cotten co-founded the indie studio in July 2013. Collectively, the team boasts over 40 years of experience and has worked on classics like Elder Scrolls, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online.

"We left our soul-crushing, corporate jobs to make the games we’d actually play,” Derek Brinkmann, the founder and CEO of Citadel Studios, said in a press statement.

“As we started our first project and experimented with concepts, we discovered ways we could share our passion for creating living worlds with gamers themselves. Ultimately, the community will dictate what Shards becomes because we’re not just providing a game but also a platform for players to express their creativity.”

According to the press release, "Shards will give players more power than ever before, without constantly asking them to take out their wallets."